Again With This: Beverly Hills, 90210

Jane's ongoing paralysis storyline basically embroils everyone this week, so let's run down the list. Peter, because Michael has made good on his threat to move out of the beach house as long as both Andrews sisters are there, and is now Odd Coupling it up at Peter's place. Bobby and Amanda, because their story branches off from Peter's. Matt, because Jo has brought him the pills she found in Richard's office to identify. Jake, because suddenly he likes Jane again. And Kimberly, because she was basically the mastermind behind the whole thing, wittingly or not. Folks: it's a lot. But that's not all: we also have the toxic triangle of Brooke, Billy, and Alison. Because of her lingering sense of responsibility toward Brooke due to having technically been her stepmother for five minutes, Alison is letting Brooke walk all over her at work. When Brooke misinterprets a moment between Billy and Alison in the D&D bullpen, things escalate. We hope you are bewitched by our podcast on "Sydney, Bothered & Bewilder

In the aftermath of Brooke's suicide attempt, a guilt-ridden Billy does everything he can think of to fulfill what he thinks are her wishes: he tells her he loves her; he gets rid of Alison; he demands that Amanda give Brooke her job back; he even cleans the bathroom floor! So if Brooke assumes they're fully back on track and that she can resume using him to try to make that baby she needs, who can really blame her? Peter confronts Bobby and Amanda about their New Year's kiss, though the result is probably not what he was hoping. After overhearing Jane, Jo, and Alison discussing who might have drugged Jane, Sydney follows Kimberly's advice to cast suspicion on the OTHER most likely culprit, Richard, by planting her pills in his office. And when Kimberly's not trying to smooth out this situation, she's creating static between Matt and Alan by spilling all the gossip about Matt and Paul. And while Jake thinks he's totally on top of his whole usury deal, Monty the loan shark lets him know that, no, actually, he'

It's about to be New Year's Eve, but not everyone's in a celebratory mood -- like Peter, who's getting sued for malpractice by some patient we don't know. Bobby invites Amanda and Peter to his house in Palm Springs, and though it seems like it'll be awkward with just the three of them there, Amanda rooks Alison into going, too. It's not like Alison has much going on back home: she starts out icing Billy out, some more. But then after Hayley's lawyer Norman tells Brooke that she won't inherit anything unless she has a baby, Brooke has to do some fancy footwork: first, tell Billy (outside the hospital) that she just found out she lost the baby; then tell him she wants to get pregnant again RIGHT AWAY. Billy thinks this plan is kind of creepy, though at least agreeing that Brooke is acting very weird rekindles Billy and Alison's friendship. Then Billy happens to run into Brooke's OB/GYN at the hospital and...well, things don't go well for Brooke from there. It turns out that the medical issue Jane suffered after

Just in time for Jane to decide she should try to mend fences with her antagonists at work, Jo goes soft and asks Richard not to go through with his plans to push her out of the business -- at least not so close to Christmas! Richard agrees, but doesn't consider whether he should put the damning paperwork into a drawer or cabinet that locks. Kimberly continues treating Sydney, giving her actually good advice on how to turn herself into the perfect doctor's wife for Michael; she also prescribes tranquilizers to help Sydney sleep, without talking her through the potential dangers of taking them. Having failed to find anything incriminating on Bobby, the FBI agents on his case try getting at him by intimidating Amanda, only to galvanize her against them and possibly all figures of authority. A trip to the doctor ends in bad news about Brooke's pregnancy, which she can't bring herself to tell Billy. Also present: Matt, Alan, and evidence that Jake is actually putting his loan shark loan to use on business expense

Look, at this point is it even worth trying to figure out what's going on with Kimberly's whole legal situation? Apparently the administration at Wilshire Memorial has given up, because they've agreed to let her work there again -- as a psychiatric intern, but still. The hospital turns out to be the nexus of a lot of new drama: Bobby makes a gigantic anonymous gift, crediting Peter as the rainmaker; and Sydney keeps hanging around trying to determine whether Michael is cheating on her with Jane. Meanwhile, Jane is oblivious about Richard's plans to cut her out of the business, though he might be wavering on those given the sexy dreams he's been having about her lately. All the Armstrongs (plus Billy) return to Los Angeles to bury Hayley, whereupon Brooke finds out about his financial troubles -- and the SEC investigation he's apparently left all his employees to deal with following his death. The reading of his will changes everyone's immediate plans and launches Alison into a tailspin about how he actually f

Once Amanda recovers from the shock of (a) seeing Bobby after seven years and (b) seeing the gun in his waistband, she agrees to let him explain himself: he still truly loves her, does not intend to kill her, and would never hurt her in any way. She's ready to say goodbye and part on friendly-ish terms...or so she says, but the single tear that falls down her cheek after her flashback to a night on the beach in Miami when he promised to get her out of marrying Jack tells the tale. Meanwhile, Peter is still trying to solidify his relationship with Amanda and isn't thrilled that she's spending any time with any other man, never mind one who's Mob-adjacent. Out in international waters, Hayley finally explains why they had to take their whirlwind second honeymoon under cover of night: he's trying to stay ahead of the SEC, and apparently thinks throwing all his incriminating papers in the ocean will solve all his problems because it's 1995 and no one has ever heard of "copies." He doesn't assume Alison will want t

Between her great new radio gig and the removal of her wrist monitor, Kimberly is really feeling herself. And it turns out she'd like men to feel her too -- as many as she can get! She's so busy scoring that she maaaaaay not devote enough concern to Vic, who keeps calling the show to tell her how bad he thinks her advice is. However, she DOES take a break from her sexcapades to warn Sydney that receiving a gift of flowers from Michael means that he's cheating on her. He's not, exactly -- he's just lying and sneaking around with Jane, who's just using him to make Richard jealous. At least, that's the state of play...for now. Jake has been stewing over Matt's suspicions about Shelly's shadiness regarding the books, but when he confronts her, she shrugs off his worries and volunteers the password she thought she already gave him, no big deal! But Matt's not willing to drop the matter. While Bobby commences his project of following Amanda around Los Angeles looking for a chance to murder her, Amanda tries to stay

Remember when the Jo/Jane/Richard/Jake/Shelly situation was merely a love pentagon? WELL. Jane tries a power play on Jo upon her return, with Richard, to the studio after their Hawaii sojourn, leaving all of Jo's photography gear in the lobby and informing her that she's fired. Richard then informs Jane that in a 50/50 partnership, she can't unilaterally fire anyone. After seeing Jo and Richard looking happy at the surprise birthday party Sydney has thrown for Michael, Jane hatches a new plan for getting Richard back on the hook: she'll make him jealous by dating a professional guy! Maybe someone who's already been in love with her once! Little does she know that Michael and Sydney are back to liking each other for real...not that Jane would probably care. And Matt starts working at Shooters just in time for Jake to need help logging into Shelly's accounting system and show him how her setup is not as transparent as one might hope. Alison and Hayley hit up a Cancun resort he owns, and which is apparently in s

After Jack kicks off in the cold open, everyone who knew anything about the circumstances surrounding his death braces for possible consequences. Michael thinks he can delay the autopsy results from getting to Nick, Jack's lawyer. Peter ignores whatever Kimberly's up to so that he can support Amanda. But she's mostly just happy the only person she ever feared has died...until Sydney gathers both her bosses and Amanda for a sushi dinner, to tell them she has an incriminating tape of Amanda and Peter that she'll pass on to the authorities if Amanda doesn't give her half her share of Jack's estate. Brooke is too sick to accompany Billy on a business trip to Santa Barbara, so Alison arranges to take her place so that she can get some face time with Billy and decide whether she really does still love him, or if she's ready to move on and accept Hayley's weird afterthought of a wedding proposal. And due to a hiccup with their travel plans, they end up getting more time together than she'd hoped! Having broken up wi

Inconveniently, Jack continues to live. Amanda is still keeping vigil at his bedside while also strategizing with Peter on how to get them both out of this, but when she tries to self-medicate with Halloween party shots, Peter intervenes...and then gets everything he wanted, if not quite the way he wanted it. At the same time, Sydney has determined that Peter and Amanda are doing something shady, and is disappointed when Michael tells her she can't use the blackmail material she acquired by secretly taping Peter and Amanda in Peter's office, over the phone. But perhaps Sydney has finally figured out she doesn't always have to listen to Michael? Jane decides she and Richard should go to Hawaii for an "inspiration shoot," to collect ideas for their next line. She starts to cool on the idea when he suggests that Jo come with them, rather than finding a local photographer, convinced Richard is just trying to maneuver himself into a romantic situation with Jo. She's right, and her calling him out does not remotely

We pick back up where we left off with the last episode: Amanda and Jack, tussling at his house. In the process, Jack ends up flying off a third-story balcony onto the hard floor of the foyer, and since Amanda doesn't think she can call the authorities, she enlists Peter to help her deal with the situation. His scheme to get Jack admitted to the hospital with a minimum of questions from other personnel seems to work, until Michael sees Peter and Amanda leaving Jack's room together and inserts himself. At the same time, Fake Henry keeps pestering Kimberly, while Kimberly keeps pestering Dr. Joyce Brothers on her apparently 24-hour-a-day radio show. Jake can't stop being jealous of the time Jo is spending with Richard, nor Jo of Shelly still hanging around. Hayley and Alison make their relationship official by telling Brooke and Billy they're in love -- but there's yet another level to which Hayley wants to take it. Finally (...in every sense of the word), Matt and his mother bury his dad, leaving them both to

Psychological torture is the order of the day: Brooke harasses Amanda by taking on Jack's new cable company as her latest client, and Jack lets Amanda know that if she tries to take too hard a line against him, he will retaliate by coming after her friends. Meanwhile, Peter tries to walk Kimberly through a therapeutic process that involves apologizing directly to all her bombing victims -- at a party celebrating the fact that she didn't succeed in killing them, no less -- and returning to the laundry room where she planted her explosives. Maybe this would work if it didn't coincide with Michael and Sydney's new project: deploying an actor who kind of looks like Henry to show up and talk to Kimberly the way the "real" Henry used to do. The Hart & Mancini crew, and Jake and Shelly, are now fully snarled up together in a romantic rat king: Jane has written off Jo for snitching on her to Richard while also trying to talk Richard into taking her back; and when Jo misses a loosely defined date with Jake because

Now that Jack's told Amanda he tracked her down so they could officially get divorced, she's eager to get the process completed so that he can leave town; she doesn't even want any of his assets or their community property -- not even that big-ass painting!!! But as he keeps hanging around, she starts to worry that he's going to resume behaving in ways that made her fake her death to flee him in the first place. Elsewhere at D&D, Brooke is so focused on making Alison tell her exactly what's going on with her and Hayley that she's apparently forgotten that she's a VP now and as such has responsibilities she's supposed to fulfill -- like bringing in business. Panicking, she declares that she'll deliver her father's company as a client, forcing her to beg Alison to help her do it. When Hayley actually does come in as a client, however, he makes sure to do it in a way that elevates Alison and humiliates Brooke. Extremely improbably, "the medical board" has judged Kimberly sane enough to be released into Peter

Once Peter brings in a sketch artist to draw a portrait of Henry (fka Schmob) from Kimberly's description, he is determined to find out who he is -- a real person? a stand-in for someone else she knew? Kimberly can't summon the memory, so he calls her mother, who is clearly stricken at the sound of his name, and comes to L.A. to tell Kimberly the whole sordid story. Elsewhere, Peter gets subpoenaed -- along with Michael and Dr. Hobbs -- to testify in Matt's sexual discrimination case. (Once again, we must report, Matt does a poor job respecting lawyers' function in the legal system, including outside courtrooms.) Jack lets Brooke know he's in town, and that he's going to need her to co-operate with him on reuniting with Amanda. She tries to keep everything to herself, but when Billy follows her to a meeting with Jack -- assuming, reasonably, that she's cheating on him -- she actually tells him the truth, for once. At the same time, her father goes around her to Alison, hoping she will join him in breaking up

Since discovering Amanda PAREZI's Florida driver's license, Brooke evidently hasn't stopped thinking about what it could mean and how to use it to her advantage. So when she heads off to Miami to (as far as Billy knows) investigate a commercial real estate investment, she quickly turns up Amanda and Jack's wedding announcement and Jack's home address, where she meets the man himself and determines that his wife, Amanda, died five years ago. Brooke returns to L.A. to extort her way into a better job and there will probably be no further repercussions! At all! Oh, and while she was gone, Billy started to share her suspicions that Alison's eyesight had returned, and got Alison to come clean. Peter confides in Sydney that the reason he's so focused on keeping Kimberly out of detention is that he had a sister who was mentally ill, and was too young to have helped her when she was in crisis. Michael decides the best way to keep Kimberly from being released is to keep riling her up in her cell, and he's got a great

Remember the last episode when Matt punched Paul at the hospital and his lawyer Alicia was like "Please don't" and he was like "Cool, cool," and we thought he understood why such actions would NOT be good for his case? Well, in THIS episode, he's just decided to wire himself up and try to maneuver Paul into confessing to all his crimes so that he can get it on tape. Alicia destroys the first, not-especially-incriminating recording Matt makes, telling him it's inadmissible anyway, and when Matt pushes back, she agrees that she shouldn't represent him anymore. Instead of taking this as a bad sign that he needs to sort himself out, Matt accepts an invitation from Paul to go over to the manse and just talk. Oh, MATT. Jane hires Jo to be Mackenzie Hart's in-house photographer, even boldly inviting Jo and Jake out for a celebratory dinner with Jane and Richard. Somehow, Jane did not foresee Richard using this occasion to bitch at Jane, through Jo, that Jane fired his photographer in order to free up the position fo

Things are starting to get back to normal-ish at the complex: with the place under construction, Amanda has arranged for the tenants in the intact apartments to billet the ones whose apartments were ruined...and invited herself to Sydney's place. This is only one of Sydney's problems this week, however: instead of talking to Jo, the only other person affected by Jess's death, Jake is self-medicating with booze and alienating everyone who loves him -- including Sydney, whom he fires when he judges her insufficiently festive at the bombing survivors' party he throws. Good thing Peter and Michael need a receptionist! Speaking of whom: while Michael remains skeptical of his motives, Peter continues trying to help Kimberly, mostly to no avail: Kimberly won't co-operate with a court psychiatrist's assessment of her sanity, and Amanda refuses his request that she not file stalking charges against Kimberly. Meanwhile, Matt doesn't help his case by confronting Paul at the hospital and punching him in front of a cafete

The Season 4 premiere picks up where the Season 3 finale left off: with Kimberly setting off an explosion at the Melrose Place apartment complex!!! In the immediate aftermath, we kind of just have to sort out who lived and died, but don't worry -- there are way more of the former than the latter. Peter has Kimberly (justifiably) committed to a psych ward; it doesn't seem like Schmob is still bothering her, but she also can't remember her part in the bombing or believe she actually could have done it. Billy and Brooke's marriage gets off to a rocky start when Billy asks to postpone the honeymoon due to, you know, all his friends who are injured -- most notably Alison, who has gone blind. It's probably only temporary, but she doesn't want Billy to know that. Matt is hurt by what he perceives as his parents' lack of support following his arrest on charges of capital murder, but does accept the fancy criminal lawyer they set him up with. Considering how much he hated Jess, and the reason the two of them were figh

Incarcerated at the county jail, Michael gets help from an unexpected visitor: DR. PETER BURNS. Apparently the whole time he's been gone he was just lying low on the advice of his excellent attorney, who's cleared him on all legal charges. Peter does still need to convince the medical board not to pull his license, which is why he's going to bail Michael out: to extort him into extolling Peter's skills as a doctor, which Michael is all too willing to do. (Peter's also romancing Kimberly all of a sudden, but that couldn't be so that she will ALSO vouch for him with the medical board...could it?!) Kimberly's mirror antagonist is also still around, and urging her to do harm to all the people who are trying to destroy her life; she doesn't need much convincing. Billy and Brooke are hurtling toward the altar, telling Hayley they want to hold the ceremony in a matter of days. Amanda is thrilled to be the one to tell Alison, when she phones the agency looking for Brooke, about the engagement. Alison calls Jo to get

Just in case Amanda wasn't fully convinced in the last episode that Michael was stalking her at home, Kimberly ALSO shows up in the parking garage at D&D to creep Amanda out by following her to her car, which Kimberly has also tagged with a gigantic "Die, Bitch" on the driver's side. Amanda then gets on board, threatening Michael herself if he doesn't leave her alone, not knowing that Kimberly intends to trash the beach house, claw up her own face, and entrap Michael for having "beaten" her. But...there's more. Eek. While Alison gets her feet under her in Hong Kong, she's also anxious to find out what Billy thought of the heartfelt letter she gave Brooke to deliver to him, which is why it's too bad that (a) Brooke read and then shredded Alison's declaration of love and (b) wrote another one that basically left it to Billy whether he wanted to stay in her life or not. Jake wakes up in the hospital after surgery entirely convinced that Jess was behind the shooting, and is unimpressed by both Jess's and Jo's